Lack of Spousal Support Can lead to Heart Disease — Dave’s Diary

Put down the newspaper and the knitting needles and listen up! Ambivalence kills! Now that I have your attention let me share again a story we reported on the Morning News about couples, interaction and heart disease.

What researchers from the University of Utah discovered is that it's better to keep the peace in your relationship for the sake of your heart health. That makes sense on the surface but is there more to this? Yup. It seems people who think their partner is unsupportive are more likely to develop heart disease, and that those who say their spouse is sometimes supportive and sometimes upsetting have higher levels of artery calcification.

I think by now most of us have heard about stress and its impact of the body and an unsupportive spouse can certainly prove stressful.

Researchers say, "There is a large body of research suggesting that our relationships are predictors of mortality rates, especially from cardiovascular disease." The researchers looked at elderly couples and found that artery calcification levels were highest when both parties in the relationship viewed each other as ambivalent-- full of both positive and negative characteristics.

Would some good and some bad cancel each other out? Not so. Researchers say, "The findings suggest that couples who have more ambivalent views of each other actively interact or process relationship information in ways that increase the stress or undermines the supportive potential in the relationship. This, in turn, may influence their cardiovascular disease risk." (Daily Mail)